The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

Winner of the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History
Literature and the 2015 PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Prize. A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet. This landmark book confronts
the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and
meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth. Humans have "subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a
wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the
darkness." We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the
planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them
invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own
extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in
extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of
vanishing species in a "frozen ark," equip orangutans with iPads, and
create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day
outsmart us. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery
intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating
journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people
and ideas now creating—perhaps saving—our future and that of our fellow
creatures.